Monday, August 1, 2016

In love with movies

(originally
published in The Outreach Connection
in July 2003)

I’ve written before
about critic David Thomson, whose Biographical
Dictionary of the Cinema (first published in 1975) had a huge impact on me
when I was growing up; I probably read the whole thing ten times over. I
couldn’t believe someone could engage with cinema as fluently as Thomson seemed
to. Even now, he influences my perception of filmmakers. If not for Thomson I’m
sure I wouldn’t think as highly of Dreyer or Rivette (or Angie Dickinson for
that matter) and I wouldn’t be as hard on Ford or Fellini.

It probably helped
that Thomson was pretty close to what I fancied I might become – a young
British guy from modest origins, engaged on a process of giddy, tireless discovery.
He writes about the early 60s in London with his best friend, “busy charting
the past of the medium we loved” and describes for illustration a week (one
week!) in 1961 when they saw Les 400
coups, L’Avventura, Senso, Dark Victory, A Taste of Honey…and nine other
films! Since no filmographies were available, they compiled their own, using
the library of the British Film Institute. It almost makes you wish that we
might lose much of cinema history, so we could have the thrill of excavating it
all over again.

David Thomson

Thomson revised his
book in 1994, and I eagerly purchased it. It was a huge disappointment – an
obvious rush job, with flaccid updates pasted forlornly on top of the peerless
original essays. He updated it again last year, and this time I haven’t
bothered buying the book. The reviews seemed to confirm that Thomson, now a
longtime resident of San Francisco, had become a lazy stylist, either unaware
of or indifferent to the contemporary cutting-edge.

A recent issue of Film Comment carried a review of the
book by Kent Jones. It’s a wonderfully written review that made me admire Jones
almost as much as I once did Thomson. And Jones nails something in Thomson that
had put me off, even though I think this too is something I absorbed into my own
approach to cinema – a pervasive air of disappointment, if not disdain. Jones
thinks Thomson expected too much of movies, and his love “turned cold because
they didn’t deliver everything he expected of them when he was young.” Jones
offers his prescription: “If you fall for the idea that cinema is any more or
less powerful than any other art form, that movies are anything other than
aesthetic objects that exist in reality, then you’re fooling yourself.” True
enough, except if it were that simple, why would Jones spend so much of his own
life writing about cinema?

The Movie Network
recently screened a documentary called Cinemania,
about five hardcore film buffs in New York. They mostly live on welfare or
disability, skimping on meals, spending day after day after day engaged in an
intricately planned swirl around the city, from one screening to the next
(scheduling bathroom breaks is a major ongoing issue). None of the five have
significant careers or, as far as one can see, meaningful relationships. I must
admit I watched it with an air of snotty superiority.

Illusion of control

Saddest of all,
although not really surprising, is that the five have relatively little to say
about the movies themselves. One guy’s obsession is with memorizing running
times. Another merely rattles off which stars he likes, and which he doesn’t.
For this, they tie their lives into a knot?

Of course, we can’t
pick and choose our obsessions. But cinema seems particularly susceptible to
this kind of hopeless immersion. I always imagine it’s something to do with the
grandeur of the experience – alone in the dark, visually and aurally
overpowered, your senses and perceptions guided in a way you don’t even
register. No matter how often you do it, it’s like a laboratory that never yields
up its secrets. It’s an utterly passive experience, and yet the activity on the
screen avoids the emptiness that (unless you have a real problem) eventually
accrues to most other time-killing activity.

With the DVD boom,
more and more viewers are conquering, or at least radically amending, this
passivity. Extras, alternative endings, commentary tracks, features that allow
you to reedit part of the movie – it all serves to make the film less a fixed
artifact than a somewhat provisional item that can be endlessly probed and
adjusted. In a recent New York Times
magazine article, Terence Rafferty suggested the dangers of these developments:
“The more ‘interactive’ we allow our experience of art – any art – to become –
the less likely it is that future generations will appreciate the necessity of
art at all. Interactivity is an illusion of control, but understanding a work
of art requires a suspension of that illusion, a provisional surrender to
someone else’s vision. To put it as simply as possible: If you have to be in
total control of every experience, art is not for you. Life probably isn’t
either. Hey, where’s the alternative ending?”

Alternative ending

Fine, but Rafferty’s
examples are mostly the likes of X-Men,
Lord of the Rings and E.T. Not to
diminish those films, but does it really matter how much enthusiasts play
around with them? How profound is the artistic experience to begin with? And
for viewers who might have a tendency to end up like the geeks in Cinemania, isn’t this healthier – a way
of avoiding complete submissiveness, of hanging onto some iota of
self-determination?

Well, yes and no.
Either way, you’re still spending too much time on a single movie. My problem
with the DVD extras isn’t their impact on the artistic experience, but the
underlying arrogance of the assumption that anyone should care that much (an
arrogance that’s amply justified of course, judging by the format’s
popularity). Rafferty’s “illusion of control” is a pale illusion indeed, if you
exercise that power by spending twenty hours of your life, and fifty or sixty
bucks, on last year’s sensation.

Still, whether it’s for
the reasons Rafferty sets out, or whether because the movies used to be better,
or because of a shift in the heavens, being in love with the movies isn’t what
it used to be. It’s hard to imagine too many future film buffs retracing David
Thomson’s arc from infatuation to disappointment, because they would never have
shared his high to begin with. When Thomson was rushing around London cramming
in movies, he was a geek no doubt, but he was also a pioneer. Today, he’d just
be a geek. When art becomes too available, it runs the risk of conversion into
kitsch. Maybe Thomson moved to the States, new technology came along,
filmographies became as available as ice cream, and after a certain point,
whether or not he still needed movies, it felt like they no longer needed him.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).